For companies of all sizes, sharing knowledge between departments is a challenge. Information that could be of use to multiple departments – from Marketing and Customer Support to PR and Risk – can easily get stuck, preventing businesses from performing at full capacity. Social data is particularly susceptible to getting stuck in “siloes” due to common perception that social data is only of use to social media and marketing departments.

KPIs are the lifelines of social media analytics. The competitive analysis of those KPIs is also of prime importance to social media marketers. The fact is that most of the companies spend a lot of time and resources in identifying and analyzing the right KPIs from social media tools like FB, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and Google+.Pinterest, and Google+. But, how intelligent, sufficient or intuitive are the built-in analytics sections of these popular social media platforms?

In the end, as you train yourself to read and understand even the general analytics reports, the better you will become at producing engaging content. We hope this behind the scenes look at our evolving YouTube channel will help you get more accustomed to reporting.

The holiday season allows retailers who may have struggled the rest of the year to go into the black. Or it can be the cherry that tops off an already good year. “A retailer’s entire year is often determined in the months leading up to the holiday season,” said Bryan Segal, CEO at Engagement Labs. “Social media is a major avenue for retailers to utilize to increase brand awareness and showcase holiday campaigns to drive both in-store and online sales.”

Analytics tools are sophisticated, rather amazing, and can really help you make some big decisions about your blog content. Turning your marketing performance metrics into actionable ways to improve your blog will help you create better content and focus that content on achieving your goals.

Setting goals, measuring performance, and optimizing your approach based on analytical data is the best way to achieve success in the shortest amount of time, and these functions can be greatly assisted by using social analytics tools. Here's some tips on selecting and using social analytics options.

Content marketing is red-hot. Not because it's a passing fad, but because it works. In Hubspot's recent State of Inbound marketing report , 41 percent of marketers confirmed content marketing's positive ROI. Like other marketers, you know that content marketing can add real value to your firm's marketing efforts, but your C-suite is still not convinced content marketing is "worth it."